As for experimentation, I’m all for it, its a core tenet of Fight and something we do actively with ourselves and our clients. But, I think this actually goes to my point, having spent most of 11 year career in agencies I can tell you – they don’t experiment. Experimentation implies that one is looking to discover some new insight and then use that to inform future decisions.

They get a budget, they come up with the biggest idea they can find and they hope for the best. When they win, they often win big. But most of the time they don’t succeed, and in fact, as a culture, have little grasp on how to actually measure success in the first place. The thing that drives me crazy though is that they take no responsibility for their success or failure when it comes to their clients and this is why I question the “fail harder” mantra. Whether it’s meant to or not, it has created a culture of recklessness, and in fact, has lionized it.

For the record, I agree, Dan is a great speaker, and very inspirational. “Fail Harder” is an inspirational mantra, and easy to get behind. The thing is, if we as an industry continue to treat our profession as a series of art projects, we’ll continue to face every shrinking budgets, and worse, ever shrinking relevance culturally.

I saw Dan Weiden speak at CreateCon and I really enjoyed his comments. It takes risk to really succeed. If you don’t take the big shot, then you don’t get the big payoff. So much of life is that way.

Kobe Bryant won six games this year by taking the last shot. Would it have been better if the team had been further ahead, not necessitating the shot? Sure. But he took the shot, and people admire the fact that he didn’t freeze up.

It’s only a false dichotomy if you take it at face value. What does it mean to Fail Harder? Of course it’s good to think about what you’re doing – but sometimes just trying a few things works too – indeed, sometimes experimentation is necessary.

America is a society that values action, this much is clear. What is confounding to me is that we’re so willing to accept massive levels of preventable failure in exchange for bold action. So much so that we often set up the false dichotomy implied in that image: its better to something today, no matter what it is, than to think about doing something tomorrow. The implication is, again, literally ANY action is better than delayed, considered action. The end result is an unbelievably low bar to get over.

Why not “Succeed Harder”?

Any way, I actually used that image in a recent lecture about the inherent dishonesty in agencies taking a clients money with the sole purpose of trying “something.” While risk and failure are part of the human experience, embracing massive failure as inevitable doesn’t help anything and has no correlation to massive success. In fact, history shows that in moments when failure is not an option, people rise to moment.